Mentoring

Peer-to-Peer is a unique, experiential learning program for people with any serious mental health condition who are interested in establishing and maintaining their wellness and recovery.

The course was written by Kathryn Cohan McNulty, a person with a psychiatric disability who is also a former provider and manager in the mental health field and a longtime mutual support group member and facilitator.

Since 2005, NAMI’s Peer-to-Peer Recovery Program has been supported by AstraZeneca.

What does the course include?

Peer-to-Peer consists of eight two-hour units and is taught by a team of two trained “Mentors” who are personally experienced at living well with mental health condition.

Mentors are trained in an intensive three day training session and are supplied with teaching manuals.

Participants come away from the course with a binder of hand-out materials, as well as many other tangible resources: an advance directive; a “relapse prevention plan” to help identify tell-tale feelings, thoughts, behavior, or events that may warn of impending relapse and to organize for intervention; mindfulness exercises to help focus and calm thinking; and survival skills for working with providers and the general public.

Support

NAMI Connection is a recovery support group program for adults living with mental health condition that is expanding in communities throughout the country. These groups provide a place that offers respect, understanding, encouragement, and hope.

NAMI Connection groups offer a casual and relaxed approach to sharing the challenges and successes of coping with a mental health condition. Each group:

Meets bi-weekly for 90 minutes

Is offered free of charge

Follows a flexible structure without an educational format

Does not recommend or endorse any medications or other medical therapies

All groups are confidential – participants can share as much or as little personal information as they wish.

Who can attend a NAMI Connection Recovery Support Group?

Support groups are open to all adults with mental a mental health condition, regardless of diagnosis. Participants should feel welcome to drop by and share feelings, difficulties, or successes.

Outreach

What is IOOV?

The In Our Own Voice program and its impact on participant’s lives… in their own voice.

In Our Own Voice (IOOV) is a unique public education program developed by NAMI, in which two trained consumer speakers share compelling personal stories about living with a mental health condition and achieving recovery.

The program was started with a grant from Eli Lily and Company.

IOOV is an opportunity for those who have struggled with a mental health condition to gain confidence and to share their individual experiences of recovery and transformation.

Throughout the IOOV presentation, audience members are encouraged to offer feedback and ask questions. Audience participation is an important aspect of IOOV because the more audience members become involved, the closer they come to understanding what it is like to live with a mental a mental health condition and stay in recovery.

Groups or organizations interested in seeing a presentation may request that one be given in their area through their state or local affiliate.

The goals of IOOV are to meet the need for consumer-run initiatives, to set a standard for quality education about mental illness from those who have been there, to offer genuine work opportunities, to encourage self-confidence and self-esteem in presenters, and to focus on recovery and the message of hope.

Anyone familiar with a mental health condition knows that recovery is not a singular event, but a multi-dimensional, multi-linear journey characterized more by the mindset of the one taking it than by his or her condition at any given moment along the way.

Understanding recovery as having several dimensions makes its uneven course easier to accept. Much as we don’t blame the cancer patient for dying of invasive tumors, we can’t condemn a consumer whose symptoms overtake his or her best efforts to manage their illness.

Recovery is the point in someone’s illness in which the illness is no longer the first and foremost part of his or her life, no longer the essence of all his or her existence.